Point of Impact #3: Boiling Harder

This black-and-white crime story has some tangled-up emotional weight to it.

Jay Faerber & Koray Kuranel's Image series Point of Impact left me conflicted at first, but now that the third issue has hit, I think I'm ready to check into this story surrounding the murder of a woman named Nicole who had quite a lot going on in her life when she met her untimely end.

It seems she was married to struggling journalist Mitch Rafferty while having an affair with an ex-Marine named Patrick Boone, who was waiting for her in their love nest when she was killed. Unfortunately for Boone, he shares a military-styled forearm tattoo with the guy who broke into Nicole's house and stole her laptop, and that's what Mitch saw before the guy escaped the scene of the crime. So Mitch is trying to untangle the web while dealing with the trauma of learning his wife was cheating on him, and that leads him in Point of Impact #3 to Ted Caulfield, who is in hiding from the nefarious drug company Emerson Global because Nicole was killed for trying to help Ted blow the whistle on his employers. It seems Emerson has their own private military contractor wing called Special Projects, which happens to be the angle Boone has started to work in order to solve the crime – and shift the police suspicion off himself.

It's a black-and-white crime story with twisted emotional weight, and my hesitance at first came almost entirely from how Kuranel was rendering the one black man in the story, one Detective Dewey, as seemingly one step away from blackface. It's been toned down a bit, or maybe I've just gotten used to it or accepted that it's not intentional, so it's less jarring now. Otherwise, the art is very solid, very heavily shaded for the noir misery it's conveying.

We've got murder, mystery, and mounting police pressure, as well as two men in love with the same dead woman trying to avenge her death, while at the same time dealing with their own devastations. It's a solid, involving pulp story well worth checking out.